Editions

Sports

Two leagues put a price on a new team — and it tells you who really owns the sport →

The NBA expects bids of $7–10bn for a Las Vegas seat; the NHL agreed $3.5bn for Texas. Expansion fees aren't a price for a team's future — they're a payment to existing owners for letting one more club exist.

Mind & Body

How your breathing runs itself — and why the urge to breathe watches carbon dioxide, not oxygen →

The body's most automatic act is controlled by a sensor most people guess wrong. The drive to breathe is set almost entirely by rising carbon dioxide, not by falling oxygen — and that single design choice explains breath-holding, dizzy spells, panic attacks, and one of the deadliest mistakes a swimmer can make.

Space

NASA spent $5.9 billion on moon hardware it is now throwing away →

An inspector general's audit found four canceled Artemis projects had more than doubled in cost and slipped years behind. Plus a six-galaxy pileup in the early universe, a new Starship breathes fire, and a Japanese probe lines up an asteroid flyby.

Climate & Energy

The Philippines is now the world's biggest buyer of solar panels — because its power bills got unbearable →

With electricity prices the highest in Southeast Asia and climbing since the Iran war began, Filipinos are putting solar on their own roofs faster than anyone else on Earth. The catch: the people most crushed by the bills can least afford the escape.

Information Technology

Google told Meta no — even Meta can't buy enough AI compute →

Google capped how much of its Gemini AI Meta could rent, because Meta wanted more computing power than Google could supply. The richest companies in tech are now rationing each other, and the chipmakers selling the shovels are having the year of their lives.

Finance News

4,000 small-town US banks are fighting a crypto law over the money in your checking account →

Community lenders say a new bill would let stablecoins pay rewards for moving deposits out of local banks — draining the savings that fund farm and small-business loans. Plus the dollar hits a one-year high and the world's central-bank umbrella group warns on debt and the AI boom.

World News

Ukraine takes the war to Russia's refineries, and Putin admits the fuel is running short →

Long-range Ukrainian drones hit two more Russian oil refineries overnight, and for the first time Putin acknowledged a "difficult period" and fuel shortages — with rationing now reaching Siberia, thousands of miles from the front.

Cybersecurity

One toolkit, 200,000 scam sites — fraud is now built like software →

A single Chinese app-building framework is behind more than 200,000 investment-scam websites, security researchers found — a sign that online fraud has turned into a mass-produced product.

Sports

The NBA built a wall that punishes you with handcuffs, not bills — and a title-winning owner is staring at it →

The "second apron" is a payroll line that doesn't just cost more money — cross it and you lose the tools to fix your team. The Knicks just won a title and their owner says going over would be "suicidal." Plus the PWHL takes its first outside money, a Blazers owner wants the public to pay for his arena, and a betting market buys its way onto the World Cup.

Food & Farming

A "Godzilla-strength" El Niño is forming — and the alarm system that would warn the food world is being switched off →

Forecasters say there is a 63% chance this El Niño reaches "very strong," among the worst since 1950. The last one this size, in 1877, helped kill tens of millions. The difference now is that we can see it coming — if the sensors stay on.

Gaming

The biggest game ever made will ship without a disc — and that quietly ends owning your games →

GTA 6 pre-orders opened at $80 with no physical copy, just a download code in a box. The same week, Sony deleted 551 "purchased" movies from people's libraries. Both are the same shift: a game you buy is now a license you rent.

Personal Money

How compound growth turns small, slow savings into large sums — and why our minds keep missing it →

Compound interest means earning interest on your interest, so the base keeps growing and the growth speeds up. Over decades the effect is enormous — but because the early years look flat, most people badly underestimate it.

Climate & Energy

Europe's roads are buckling, its trains are slowing, its homes have no escape — the built world was made for a cooler climate →

A record heatwave is not just killing people across Europe. It is exposing how much of the physical world — highways, rail lines, rooftops, water supply — was designed for temperatures that no longer hold.

Space

The Sun could knock out the grid the AI boom is built on — and almost no one is planning for it →

A solar storm severe enough to damage the grid is overdue, and the data centers powering AI can't ride one out. Plus the loudest black-hole crash ever heard, Euclid's stunning Milky Way core, and a repair spacewalk that says a lot about a tired space station.

Biotech & Longevity

The week age stopped meaning your birthday — and a body clock predicted cancer →

A 154,000-person study found a generation's bodies are ageing faster than the calendar says, and that the gap predicts who gets cancer young. Plus a Yale study where half of older adults got better, not worse, and a family-tree hunt that narrowed the genes for a long healthy life from 20,000 to 12.

Mind & Body

How your stress response works — built to switch on in seconds, never built to stay on →

The fight-or-flight system is a brilliant short-burst tool: it floods you with fuel and speed for a real emergency, then is supposed to switch off. Modern life keeps it switched on, and that's where the harm comes from.

World News

Burkina Faso cuts ties with France, finishing a divorce that was already over in everything but name →

A West African junta formally severs relations with its former colonial ruler — the last paperwork on a split made years ago. Plus Ukraine strikes deep inside Russia, Europe's strongmen recede, Trump threatens a 100% tariff on digital taxes, and bird flu reaches its last continent.

Information Technology

Australia is fining tech firms $99m for kids who slip past its under-16 ban — and the kids are still slipping past →

Australia doubled the maximum penalty on platforms that fail to keep under-16s off social media, even as new research finds more than four in five teens are still online six months in. The fight has become less about banning kids and more about who has to prove they're gone — and what counts as proof.

Finance News

The "fixed" mortgage isn't fixed — and the squeeze on American homes is the day's real money story →

A 30-year fixed-rate loan was meant to be the one bill that never moved. Rising property taxes and insurance have quietly broken that promise, just as a key inflation gauge hits a three-year high and shoppers stretch every dollar.

Sports

Britain moves to keep the World Cup free — as the rest of sport learns to charge for everything →

The UK is extending a 1996 rule that keeps its biggest sporting moments free-to-air into the streaming age — a deliberate exception to a market that, everywhere else this week, is charging more for less.

Cybersecurity

Two dozen companies were breached through a vendor they'd plugged into years ago →

A break-in at the market-research firm Klue rippled out to its customers — including the security firms LastPass and BeyondTrust — through standing connections nobody was watching.

Gaming

Google starts cutting its Play Store fee — the price of being the only road to your phone →

After losing to Epic, Google is splitting its 30% app-store cut into a billing fee and a service fee, dropping small developers to 10%. It starts June 30 in the US, UK, and Europe.

Food & Farming

Fertilizer prices are finally falling. The farmer who already bought his won't feel it for a year. →

A tentative U.S.–Iran deal reopened the Strait of Hormuz and fertilizer prices are dropping — but American farmers locked in their costs months ago. Washington is now asking Congress for another $11 billion in aid.

Biotech & Longevity

Soil bacteria carry a built-in four-drug antibiotic cocktail — and it's hard to outrun →

A single gene cluster in common soil bacteria makes four antibiotics at once, all hitting the same essential pathway in different places. Bacteria can dodge one drug; dodging four is far harder.

Space

Two planets the size of Jupiter, lighter than cotton candy →

Astronomers found a pair of 'super-puff' worlds 1,110 light-years away — Jupiter-sized but so faint in mass that Jupiter itself is up to 35 times denser. Plus a planet that brushes magnetic fields with its star, and a new tool to triage the search for life.

Personal Money

The fee you pay every time you change money — that never shows up as a fee →

Climate & Energy

A US tax-credit deadline is making solar developers stampede before July 4 →

Solar companies have rushed to lock in federal subsidies before a July 4 cutoff, building a 200-gigawatt backlog of projects — nearly doubling the US solar fleet — while warning that power from any deal struck after the deadline could cost 40 to 120 percent more.

Information Technology

Trump threatens a 100% tariff on any country that taxes US tech — and a trade deal signed days ago is suddenly in doubt →

A fight over how to tax borderless companies escalates into a tariff threat, while memory-chip costs, a supply-chain breach, and a big chip deal reshape the week.

Mind & Body

How your body holds a steady 37°C — and why a fever is the thermostat turned up on purpose →

Your body defends its core temperature within a fraction of a degree, around the clock, using a handful of crude levers. A fever isn't that system breaking. It's the same system deliberately moving its own target upward, because heat is a weapon against the things that infect you.

Finance News

SpaceX joins the Nasdaq-100, and index funds must buy it whether they want to or not →

Two weeks after its record IPO, SpaceX gets added to two of the biggest stock indexes — forcing passive funds to buy billions of dollars of a company that lost $4.9 billion last year.

World News

A drone hits a cargo ship in the world's busiest oil lane, and a fragile peace with Iran starts to crack →

Iran struck a commercial vessel in the Strait of Hormuz, the US hit back, and a preliminary deal to end the Iran war now hangs on who controls one stretch of water.

Cybersecurity

A flaw hid in software on billions of machines for 25 years — until an AI went looking →

A bug that sat untouched in curl since 2001 was finally found this month, part of a wave of old flaws surfacing now that AI tools are reading code no human had re-examined in years. Plus a Cisco bug exploited two months before anyone knew, and why scam centres keep surviving every crackdown.

Food & Farming

The Supreme Court shields Roundup's maker, and a decade of cancer claims hits a wall →

A 7-2 ruling says a federal pesticide label overrides state failure-to-warn lawsuits — clearing tens of thousands of cases against Monsanto. Plus farm aid, falling fertilizer, and a strong corn crop.

Gaming

Bungie cuts most of the Destiny team — the standing crew a forever-game leaves behind →

Sony laid off a large part of Bungie weeks after Destiny 2's final update, exposing the hidden cost of a game promised to run forever: a permanent crew that only makes sense while the promise holds.

Sports

A heat break for the players became a $250m ad goldmine — and that's why it will stay →

Mandatory hydration breaks at the World Cup were sold as player welfare. They've also opened up more than $250m in new TV ads in the US alone — and that money, not the heat, is what locks them in.

Personal Money

Why a pay raise into a higher tax bracket never leaves you worse off →

Most people think jumping into a higher tax bracket taxes their whole income at the new rate. It doesn't — only the slice above the line is taxed higher, so a raise always leaves you with more.